Member Article

How to build longer lasting customer relationships

Nick Peart Marketing Director EMEA, for Zendesk

With customer acquisition a far greater challenge than customer retention, building longer lasting customer relationships is key to ensuring business success in the new customer economy.

The voice of the customer has never been louder; your customers have the power to bring you more business or drive it away -via recommendations - or rants - that broadcast on social media. This is the reality of today’s customer economy and the reason why these relationships matter more than ever.

Organisations today need to understand how these relationships really work and how they can harness them through use of effective communications, as future revenue can depend on those relationships lasting beyond a single transaction. Customer service interactions are now becoming the primary means of developing meaningful relationships and businesses with positive customer-centric thinking which help make customers feel connected, listened to, and ultimately loyal are ultimately the most successful.

Five ways to build lasting customer relationships:

1. Justify your presence

You are not the centre of your customer’s world and as with all good relationships, you must listen to and consider the other person. A person is not ‘your’ customer, even when they are buying your product. It is a privilege for you to be in their life, not the other way round.

2. Be consistent

All relationships have memories. A customer who buys a product is the same one who contacts you when a product breaks – those two moments are connected and organisations need to recognise this. Customers know that seamless and consistent customer service should be possible across all sales channels.Those businesses that consistently and usefully respond to consumers, no matter the channel, benefit the most.

3. Be transparent

Customers should not have to work hard to get the information they need. They want us to share the information they know we have. The only way to establish trust and loyalty is to show your cards. That means giving your customers the same information as you have – good or bad. This is also where any failings in your transparency become apparent in what people say about you via social media. Entering a discussion with your followers and listening to what’s incoming is just as important as producing content.

4. Put a face to your customers

When customer relationships are the sole responsibility of sales or customer support people it’s easy to ignore customer relationships, but they should be a shared responsibility for your entire organisation. Consumers are real people, recognise their problems are real and empathise. Personalise everything, there is no template for people as everyone is different and we don’t want to be a number. Customers give companies our personal information so in return they want us to use it properly and tailor an approach to us.

5. Be empowering

Employees need to be allowed and encouraged to act like people. Customer service teams should not act like machines. While little mistakes can occur when you allow people, not computers, to take ownership of decisions, they make an organisation real rather than a faceless monolith. Zendesk’s latest report http://www.zendeskbenchmark.com/ on customer service and support interactions between 25,000 organisations revealed that the more a customer service agent has to apologise in a conversation, the more customer satisfaction drops. Personality and ‘can do’ attitude makes organisations more responsive - and help people identify the organisations they want to interact with. So always be human and remember people like people – and put that at the heart of your customer service today.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Zendesk .